The ocher color and exposed metal structures of Victor Horta's Hotel Van Eetvelde were revolutionary.
Art Nouveau lovers are in luck. This 2018, Brussels has insisted on showing its curves and has not hesitated to unleash all its artillery: it pays homage to the architect Victor Horta and has just inaugurated the second edition of the Brussels Art Nouveau & Art Decó Festival (BANAD), which opens to the public more of 60 emblematic buildings of the city.
BANAD
Until March 25, Art Nouveau enthusiasts will be able to slide their hands along the carved railings of its winding stairs, step on the tiny tesserae that make up its incredible mosaic floors and be fascinated by the natural forms of furniture designed in as much detail as the own arrangement of spaces.
And all this accompanied by expert guides who They will unravel the most fascinating secrets of these original constructions that were born at the end of the 19th century in the Belgian capital with the sole intention of breaking with established architectural norms (reservations at www.banad.brussels; eight visits: €32; one visit: €10).
Stairs of the Hotel Max Hallet (1902-1905), designed by Victor Horta.
The festival is made up of three routes (on foot, by bicycle or by bus) that will take place during the weekends of the month of March and that, as a novelty, this 2018 includes more than a dozen private buildings never before open to the public, such as Fernand Dubois's home and studio on Brugmann in Forest Avenue or Wolfers Brother's jewelry store, whose interior design has been 'reconstructed' inside one of the rooms of the Royal Museums of Art and History of the Cinquantenaire Park (until December 31, 2018).
To this end, the original furniture has been placed in the same arrangement that Victor Horta designed in 1912, the year this luxurious store opened, and the windows have been decorated with pieces of high jewelry designed by Philippe Wolfers and his son Marcel –including several of the jewels created for Queen Fabiola, wife of King Baudouin–.
As part of the BANAD there will also be concerts, markets, conferences and activities for families, such as a workshop in which children will be taught to differentiate between the modernist details of Art Nouveau and those belonging to Art Déco.
Art Nouveau buildings in Brussels.
HORTA INSIDE OUT
But if someone deserves special attention within Art Nouveau, this is Victor Horta, its precursor and one of the greatest exponents of this style, much more than architectural (if we take into account that Horta was concerned with designing from the flow of circulation between environments to the door handles themselves).
Because conceiving a building as 'a whole' was one of the novelties of Art Nouveau, which opted for natural light and meant a hitherto unknown harmonic, artistic and functional explosion.
There are many activities planned for this 2018 around the figure of the Belgian genius under the name of Horta Inside Out, but you should not miss the so-called Masterpieces Art Nouveau (the first Saturday of each month), which includes, among other visits, the access to three of the four buildings in Horta declared Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO: the Hotel Tassel (€20), considered the first Art Nouveau building (1893), the Hotel Solvay (1894-1898) with its ornamental richness (€40) and the Hotel van Eetvelde (€20), whose stained glass windows make the light vibrate that affects the enormous spaces created in his day (1895-1897) for Edmon van Eetvelde, adviser to King Leopold II and Secretary General of the Congo (let's see if you can find the elephant trunk reinterpreted by Horta in the decorative details ) .
Detail of the stained glass windows of the Hotel Frison, by Victor Horta.
HORTA MUSEUM
The fourth Art Nouveau building in Brussels declared a World Heritage Site is the Horta Museum, made up of what was his private home and his attached studio-workshop. Both buildings are of special beauty and in them you can appreciate both the rational distribution of the spaces and the decorative details with which he evoked nature.
The precise molds that he used are striking so that, when ordering the manufacture of either the metal columns or the wooden furniture, there would be no type of error and the result would be the closest thing to the original design that he had imagined for a space.
Immersed in a series of reforms that will make it easier for visitors to visit, the museum will open the temporary exhibition Horta and the Light on March 27 (until June 24), which will unravel the architect's mastery and play with chiaroscuro and that will help to understand a little better the revolution that Art Nouveau meant in the history of Architecture.
Guest room in Victor Horta's house, today the Horta Museum.